The Portrait that Inspired a Novel
My husband Steve and I bought “Bird Girl” by the Russian artist Ludmila Mikhailovna Sgibneva on a dreary Sunday afternoon in Moscow.
We were newlyweds at the time and had spent the day lingering over brunch with friends — the sort of long, leisurely Moscow lunch involving excellent food and rather too much Sovetskoye Shampanskoye. On the way home, we wandered into a small gallery near our flat and found ourselves standing in front of “Bird Girl”.
We both loved it immediately. Perhaps it was the champagne, perhaps the warmth and sunlight radiating from the painting itself, but we bought it on the spot.
Over the following years, the portrait travelled everywhere with us — Cairo, London, Cape Town, Dakar — before eventually settling with us in south-west London. No matter where we lived, it always seemed to find a place on the living room wall.
For years, I knew almost nothing about the artist.
Then, one evening — nearly fifteen years later — I searched for Ludmila Mikhailovna Sgibneva online. To my astonishment, the portrait hanging beside me suddenly appeared on my screen.
Or rather, not exactly our portrait. The image online was the original study for the painting we owned, held in a gallery in Ekaterinburg, where Sgibneva still lives. Reading further, I discovered that she had survived the Siege of Leningrad as a child and had continued painting throughout her life.
Suddenly I began looking at the portrait differently.
Who was this girl surrounded by birds? Why had Sgibneva painted her in 1979? What had become of the artist during the collapse of the Soviet Union? How had she endured such extraordinary upheaval?
The more I imagined Sgibneva’s story, the more fascinated I became — not only by the painting itself, but by the life behind it.
At the time, I had recently left my job teaching English as a second language and was taking a beginner’s creative writing course at Richmond Adult Community College. I had always enjoyed writing, but I had no serious ambitions to become a novelist.
And yet, slowly, a story began to form around the portrait and the woman who had painted it.
While writing The Girl from the Hermitage, I never contacted Sgibneva directly, but I often felt her presence hovering quietly behind the work.
Eventually, after the novel was completed, I telephoned her to ask permission to use the image of the painting on my website.
She sounded exactly as I had imagined.
I described the portrait and asked whether she remembered it.
“Of course I remember,” she replied briskly. “It’s my work.”
Then, delightfully, the octogenarian artist suggested we continue the conversation via WhatsApp.
One day, I hope to meet her in person and learn the real story behind the portrait.
Inspiration has a curious way of finding us. Sometimes an idea can hang quietly on the wall for years before finally revealing the story hidden inside it.
